an Augmented Reality Resource

Menu

News

Google teams up with Labster to develop 30 immersive lab experiences for the Daydream platform. STEM students engaged in scientific disciplines, such as biochemistry and neuroscience, are often required by their respective degrees to spend a certain amount of time engaged in an official laboratory environment. Unfortunately, crowded universities and the rise of online education

Mozilla’s shared virtual reality app Hubs launched back in April as a WebVR “experiment” — a basic 3D environment for cross-platform immersive social experiences. The organization has now announced the “first big feature update” to Hubs: You can now import content into a shared Hubs room just by pasting a web link or dragging and dropping.

What kind of content, you might ask? From the web, you can import documents, images, videos, and 3D models from various sites, including PDFs and content from Imgur, Giphy, YouTube, Sketchfab, Poly, and GLTF. Additionally, you can now upload files directly from your phone or computer to Hubs, or share the clipboard from your current Hubs-accessing device for group perusing.

If that list isn’t enough for your collaborative VR sharing needs, Mozilla promises to keep “adding more and more supported content types and methods for bringing more media into Hubs.”

Since there’s potential for shared content to get into the wrong hands, Mozilla says that it encrypts what goes into the room — notably on the server rather than end-to-end — and uses tokens to restrict access to people who were in the room when the content was shared. Content is stored for 48 hours after the last access time, then automatically deleted.

By design, Hubs works across “any VR device on the market,” as well as phones and PCs. You can try it out for yourself through Mozilla’s Hubs site here, and view the open source code here.

I’m one of those people who is still playing Pokémon Go, the location-based mobile game that set the world on fire in July 2016. If you ask me why, I’ll have to say that I really don’t know why. It’s not because it has addictive gameplay.

Sometimes we play games for a long time, and it isn’t easy to explain why. We’re always a little sheepish when someone asks how many hours we’ve put into it. I don’t know why, but I’ve walked hundreds of kilometers with Pokémon Go over the past two years. Yet I was never much of a Pokémon fan before Niantic Labs‘ game came along.

I’m not alone in this habit. Pokémon Go has made more than $1.9 billion in gross player spending since launching two years ago this month, according to measurement firm Sensor Tower. In terms of unique installs of one per Apple ID or Google account, it has been downloaded more than 500 million times (The Pokémon Company’s figure is more than 800 million). The game grossed approximately $70 million in June 2018 and $182.5 million in the last quarter, making it the No. 8 grossing game in June and the No. 7 grossing in 2Q18. And in June, market researcher SuperData Research said Pokémon Go had its biggest number of players in two years.

As far as gameplay goes, I’ve played more exciting mobile games like Clash Royale, Dawn of Titans, and HQ Trivia. I’ve dropped Pokémon Go to play games like Westworld, and sometimes I’ve stayed away for a long time. But I’ve always come back to it, like a security blanket. It’s kind of like how World of Warcraft players keep going back to their game when it receives a new update. And Niantic keeps doing enough on the update front to make the game feel fresh enough to return to.

Above: That’s me in Pokémon Go, in case you see me out in the wild.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I’m sure that rivals in mobile gaming underestimated the power of Pokémon Go, as it seemed like a simple game that was easy to beat.

With Pokémon Go, I think it’s a whole collection of mini motivators, including some that have nothing to do with gaming. My dog, for instance, has to be walked. A big park with nine PokéStops is within walking distance of my house, and that makes it easier for me to make progress in the game. And often Pokémon Go is the only way I can get close to 30 minutes of exercise in a day. I’m obsessed with getting those walks in, since I can see results on my Apple Watch.

Niantic Labs created the app in part because its creators feared we had too much screen time, sitting at our desks. It got us sedentary gamers off the couch and walking around outside. With me, the chance to improve my physical fitness was a key motivator. At other times, I play out of boredom, like I don’t have enough other good games to play on mobile devices.

Part of the point was to turn interesting city landmarks into PokéStops so that we could visit them and learn

EmBRAZEN brand wines celebrates women’s history with augmented labels highlighting three incredible female figures. Since its initial launch, Tactic’s Living Wine Labels app has received over 1.2 million downloads, providing augmented wine bottle labels to five high-profile brands. Whether it’s the Walking Dead cabarnet or a 19 Crimes shiraz, the company appears to have a